The Bottom of Your Heart

by Maurizio de Giovanni

  “How do you think I’ve been, Signo’? It’s a tragedy. We’ll be doing one thing and that one comes up with something entirely different. We skip around from a Neapolitan canzone to a poem, from a poem to a romanza from a romanza back to a canzone. I’m going out of my mind trying to keep up with him.”

  From the far end of the room, Don Libero, standing with a page from a musical score in one hand, called loudly: “Pay him no mind, Signo’. He just likes to mock me behind my back. If he were anything less than the finest composer in this town, do you think I’d keep his ugly mug around? And after all, when inspiration strikes, who am I to ignore it? We try to describe human passions in the simplest possible terms. It’s what I’ve always said, isn’t it? It’s so simple to write difficult, it’s so difficult to write simple! But enough trivial chitchat: how can I repay you for having brought such a ray of loveliness into this vale of tears?”

  “I’ve come to ask a favor. To ask a favor of you both.”

  She explained what she wanted. When she was done, Don Libero and Don Ernesto looked at each other. Then the little fat man excitedly threw his arms out wide.

  “Donna Livia, what you say is wonderful. When a singer rediscovers her will to sing, after so many years and so much grief, it means that she’s rediscovered her will to live. For me, and I feel safe in speaking for our friend Ernesto, too, it’s an immense joy and a great honor to know that you chose to come here to us in search of the right words and music. Tell me: what sentiment do you wish to sing? Jealousy? Regret? Sorrow? Love?”

  “I couldn’t say, exactly, Don Libero. But I think passion. Simply passion.”

  The man’s face lit up: “Passion. Of course, passion! What else, if not passion?” He wandered the room, murmuring under his breath and digging through the mess until, triumphant, he seized a couple of sheets and cried: “Here it is!” He went over to the piano and placed the pages on the music rack. “Now then, Donna Livia, listen carefully. You said that you’re looking for a canzone that has never been sung, and you wanted us to write it especially for you. But now I want to ask a favor of you. This is a song that our friend Ernesto and our beloved Nicola, whom you know, have stitched together. We were planning to debut it at the Piedigrotta festival, though not this year’s, because we’ve already got too many projects underway. Still, we believe that this song could truly go down in our city’s musical history, if we do say so ourselves. And so, what better challenge for your enchanting voice?”

  “Don Libero, perhaps this isn’t the right occasion for such an important canzone. Perhaps something more modest . . .”

  The little man raised one hand: “No, I’ve made up my mind. You’re the one to sing it, you must.”

  Livia was frightened.

  “I beg of you, not something like this. It’s been such a long time since . . . I’m not sure if I’m up to it.”

  The pianist took the sheet music and said: “At least listen to it. Then you can decide.”

  After Ernesto finished playing, Livia, with tears in her eyes and her heart racing wildly, decided that she would sing that song or no other.

  If it was the last performance of her life, she was determined to sing that canzone.

  XLVIII

  It was too late to head back to police headquarters.

  Ricciardi and Maione opted instead for a pizza cart that stood at the corner of Piazza Quattro Palazzi, on the harbor side. The plume of smoke rising from the large kettle of hot, bubbling oil and the unmistakable, heavenly aroma were better than a neon sign.

  Maione’s police uniform ensured that the line of famished citizens ahead of them quickly grew noticeably shorter. From time to time, the sidewalk chef, wearing his grease-stained white smock, shouted: Pizze càvere, oggi a otto! The phrase in dialect announced hot pizza you could eat today and pay for eight days hence. This cunning and traditional term of sale made for a grateful and loyal clientele, with only a limited risk of an unpaid pizza every now and then.

  Maione opted for cicinielli e pummarola, tiny fried fish and tomato, while Ricciardi went for garlic, oil, and oregano. The commissario realized, from his stomach’s angry rumbling, that he hadn’t had a bite to eat in the past twenty-four hours, and his thoughts went sadly to Rosa.

  As he sank his teeth into the pizza, precariously perched forward to keep from dripping onto his uniform, the brigadier said: “All things considered, Commissa’, it just doesn’t add up. It seems to me that the widow must have had her suspicions about the professor’s affair, but didn’t really give a damn.”

  Ricciardi swallowed: “Yes, I had the same impression. One of those marriages that turn into something like a business partnership: each looks to his or her own best interests.”

  With an exchange of hand gestures, Maione ordered a second round from the fry cook.

  “I can’t understand it, Commissa’. If two people are married they’re married, and they should be husband and wife. Otherwise, they should just break up.”

  Ricciardi looked at his watch: “We have another hour or so, then I want to go to the hospital to see if there’s any news.”

  Maione nodded as he chomped.

  “Well then, we’d better swing by and see Coviello the goldsmith, Commissa’. He’s close by, at the borgo. We can be there in ten minutes. There’s something I want to do, too, before going home.”

  It was in fact a short walk from there to the borgo degli orefici—the goldsmiths’ district—but the distance between those two worlds, the world of Corso Umberto, a busy, crowded thoroughfare overrun by carriages and automobiles, lined with gleaming shopwindows, and the world dominated by a tangled grid of narrow, identical alleys and lanes that hadn’t changed an iota in more than a century, seemed enormous.

  Over time, though, the work done by those extraordinary artisans, who belonged to a school of craftsmanship as good as that of any of their rivals anywhere on earth, had altered with the shift in demand from their clientele. The imitation of antique jewelry, which had been so popular sixty years earlier, had been replaced at the turn of the century by a more international taste. Certain trades, such as wire-drawing and crucible-handling, had gradually disappeared, giving way to cloisonné enameling and engraving. And many artisans had opened shops on Via Toledo, featuring glittering window displays that attracted women’s eyes and intimidated men’s wallets.

  The craftsmen who had remained in the borgo were the ones who tended to cleave to tradition. Nearly all of them had kept their workshops, but now they sold directly to a retail clientele; only a very few persisted in remaining strictly creators of custom-made jewelry. The age-old vocation of making objects of sacred art had declined with the waning of demand, but it survived in the hands of a few authentic artists who created the images displayed in the family chapels of noble houses or that decorated monumental tombs at the cemetery.

  The impression that Ricciardi gathered, as Maione inquired as to the whereabouts of the workshop of Nicola Coviello, was one of a general decline. The poverty that had insinuated itself everywhere, however loudly the state-controlled press proclaimed the opposite, was having its effect on trade. If I can barely afford to eat, the people reasoned, then I certainly can’t spend money on gold and coral.

  The workshop they were seeking was tucked away in a dead-end vicolo far from the main piazza. A few hens pecked away at the cobblestones, while two women sitting on rickety chairs in the shadows repaired a fishing net. One of the women, noticing the policemen, gestured to the other, and both women stared, though without pausing in their work, running the mesh through their fingers in search of rips and tears that might need to be reknotted, as if telling a rosary. At the far end of the vicolo stood a low door, without a sign; Coviello, clearly, had no interest in attracting the attention of walk-in customers.

  They stepped in and stopped, waiting for their eyes to become accustomed to the difference in light. The heat in the vi
colo, where the air stagnated, was bad enough, but it was even more intense in the workshop, where a small furnace to melt metals increased the temperature. The lighting, which came from an oil lamp, was focused on a heavy, rough-hewn block of wood that was being used as a workbench, its surface worn smooth with use and marked by hammer blows, its massive legs spaced widely enough to leave room for at least four workers to sit around it. At the moment, though, only Coviello was working at it; when Maione’s imposing silhouette darkened the door to the street, the goldsmith looked up, his eyelids blinking rapidly behind the thick lenses of old spectacle frames.

  “Buonasera, Coviello. We’ve come, Commissario Ricciardi and I, to ask you a few questions, if we’re not intruding on your work.”

  The goldsmith wrapped the object he’d been working on in a dark cloth. He stood up, walked over to the safe, and opened it, depositing the bundle inside. After closing the safe, he turned to Maione: “Come right in, Brigadie’. I’m sorry, but I have no place for you to sit, unless you come join me at the workbench.”

  Ricciardi stepped in and took a look around. He’d expected something else: so renowned a craftsman, someone whose skills were so widely acknowledged that he was given commissions by clients like Iovine, ought by rights to have had a proper atelier. Instead, the workshop was bare, with no goods on display, no decorations, no furnishings to speak of. Aside from the workbench and two low stools, there was a tool rack with instruments of various shapes and sizes, the furnace, and a safe. Hanging over the stool where Coviello sat was the oil lamp.

  The walls were spotted with damp patches. Occupying the center of one wall hung a faded print of the Madonna del Carmine and a bunch of fresh flowers slipped into an iron ring fixed into the masonry. On the facing wall was a calendar from ten years earlier decorated by an equally faded drawing of a steamship departing, and then a hand-colored photograph of a young man with a spectacular mustache and a cap on his head; beneath the picture stood a lit candle on a small shelf. Against the third wall was a cabinet and on the fourth, next to the door to the street, were pages torn out of a magazine depicting female models wearing complicated-looking jewelry. Bare rafters crossed the ceiling.

  It could have been a cobbler’s shop, or a blacksmith’s forge. And Coviello himself could have been a very different kind of artisan, with those huge hands and long arms and his stout, bent body. His eyes, behind the thick lenses, were enormous and expressionless.

  “What can I do for you?”

  Ricciardi said: “We’d like to ask you a few more questions about the night you took the two rings to the professor. Could you tell us anything else about the silhouette you glimpsed as you were leaving?”

  Just as Coviello was about to reply, a young girl hurried in: “Mastro Nico’, excuse me, mammà told me that she has to go down to our apartment for a moment to do something, can you come look after your mother?”

  The goldsmith gazed at Ricciardi and Maione, then spoke to the young girl: “All right, I’m coming.” He got to his feet and addressed the policemen: “Forgive me. My mother . . . my mother isn’t well, and a woman who lives in the same apartment house does me a favor and stays with her. But right now she has an errand to run, so I have to head home. You could either wait for me here, though I’m not sure how long it will take, or come along.”

  Ricciardi exchanged a glance with Maione, who said: “We’d prefer to come with you, if you don’t mind. It’s just a matter of five minutes, it’s not worth the bother of making you come back here.”

  Coviello locked the workshop door by sliding an iron bar into two runners and then set off down the vicolo. Observing his back, Ricciardi noticed again how the man’s spine reminded him of a question mark, and wondered how he managed to move with such agility.

  The man’s home wasn’t far away, just around the corner from the dead-end vicolo. Coviello climbed a narrow staircase, at the top of which a door stood open. A young woman wearing a grim expression, came toward him: “Mastro Nico’, forgive me, I have to go out because my sister-in-law is here and . . .”

  She saw the policemen and fell suddenly silent, shutting her mouth with an odd sound.

  “Don’t think twice, Donna Conce’, take your time. The gentlemen here haven’t come to arrest me, don’t worry, they’re just interested in asking a few questions about a customer of mine. When you can get back, I’ll head back to my shop.”

  The woman slipped away, not without one last unfriendly sidelong glance at Maione, who once again reflected bitterly on how his uniform was far from a ticket to the hearts of his fellow Neapolitans, whatever the neighborhood.

  The apartment was dark, the heat was suffocating, and there was a strange smell, the sickly sweet scent of mold mingled with the acid scent of cooking and a deeply unpleasant lingering whiff of urine. A very old person lived there, you could sense it in the air.

  Coviello called out in a loud voice: “Mammà! Mammà, where are you?”

  A woman appeared. In the dim light of late afternoon, she was a frightening vision; Maione felt a shiver run down his spine.

  Her thinning white hair stuck straight up from her skull, forming a sort of cloud around her head. Her nose, with a large mole in the middle of it, had a hump in the center that turned the tip downward, until it practically touched her jutting jaw. Her toothless mouth hung open in a ghoulish grin that had something of a leer about it. But most shocking of all were the eyes, veiled with cataracts, in which a glitter of youthful folly played.

  “Oooh, Nicolino’s home. Mamma d’o Carmene, Nicoli’, how ugly you’ve become! And just who are these gentlemen who’ve come with you? Look how handsome the one in uniform is; who is he, a soldier? Does he want to be my boyfriend?”

  Coviello replied brusquely: “Mammà, these gentlemen need to talk with me. Go in the other room, please. Do me a favor. Afterwards, I’ll bring you a candy, all right?”

  The old woman stepped closer still, staring at Maione. She ran a huge black tongue over her lips and said: “Listen, soldier, did you know that Nicolino is engaged? His fiancée has come back, and now he’s going to get married. I want to get married too. Do you want to marry me?”

  She reached out her hand toward the crotch of Maione’s trousers, and the policeman leapt backwards. Coviello, more annoyed than embarrassed, grabbed the old woman by both arms, dragged her into the adjoining room, and closed the door on her.

  “I’m sorry, my mother is terribly old and doesn’t understand a thing anymore. She thinks she’s a young woman again. Now then, down in the shop you were asking me about that night. I can’t see very well, the work I do has hurt my eyesight. Also, it was dark out. But anyway, there was someone sitting on the bench. He was a very big man, no doubt about that, or I wouldn’t have been able to see him at all. He looked like a mountain, that’s how big he was.”

  Ricciardi insisted: “But was there anything unusual about him? Try to think. Was he bent over to one side? Was he young, old . . . Even the slightest detail might prove useful.”

  The jeweler stopped to think, one hand under his chin, his myopic eyes staring into space.

  “Commissa’, perhaps, but just perhaps, he might have seemed . . . young, I suppose. I couldn’t say why, but now that I think back I did have the impression that he was just a boy.”

  Ricciardi nodded.

  “And the professor didn’t seem particularly worried, did he? When you went to deliver the two rings to him, I mean.”

  “No, Commissa’. He was the same as he’d always been. For that matter, I didn’t really bother to notice his mood; all I wanted was to deliver the jewelry and get paid. He was a brisk, practical man, and so am I.”

  Maione decided to insist on the topic, to see if he could extract any evidence at all.

  “And the other times, when he came to see you, did he stay? Did he tell you anything, for instance, about why he wanted two rings that were identica
l? And why he picked that particular style of ring?”

  “Brigadie’, I really couldn’t tell you. He was no different from all the other clients who come to the workshop. I never ask questions and I keep my mouth shut. I mind my own business. My line of work, believe me, is one where it’s best to be discreet: if you only knew how many people commission fine objects that aren’t for their wives. The style, however, was something I’d recommended for the first ring, and like I told you before, when he came back for the second ring, he wanted it to be identical, only with a larger stone. It’s a piece of jewelry in the latest fashion; I told him that it was ideal for slender fingers, and he seemed happy about that. I delivered both to him as soon as I was done with them, as agreed; he paid me and that was the end of it.”

  Ricciardi sighed in disappointment: “And you don’t remember anything else: a phrase, a reference . . .”

  The goldsmith held out his long arms: “Commissa’, I’m sorry.”

  The policemen said goodbye to Coviello and left.

  That was the last time they saw him alive.

  XLIX

  Maione’s feet, indifferent to the aches and the heat that still persisted in the late afternoon, refused to take him back home or to police headquarters, and the brigadier found himself wandering down Via Toledo.

  The Iovine case was weighing on him. He didn’t feel any particular compassion for the doctor, who was leading a double life and had something of a shadowy past. Nor had the widow seemed particularly crushed by her grief: if anything, the woman seemed to possess abundant resources, both emotional and economic, that would allow her to bounce back; and to be rather cynical, this was hardly the most cold-blooded of murders. After all, when you throw someone out a window, you don’t even see him die. No, what was making Maione uneasy was his own state of mind during this investigation.

  Usually it was Ricciardi who tended to split hairs, to keep pressing during questioning, to mistrust anything a suspect or a witness had to say. Maione was usually the one who started with the assumption that everyone was innocent, that everyone was telling the truth. Hatred, envy, and a desire for vengeance were strangers to him, and it struck him as absurd that anyone could be pushed to commit a murder by those emotions.